Louis Gossett Jr said in a TV interview that he had talked while gargling saliva as a kid as one of those kid things. He told the director that he thought that it would add a good touch to his character.

The whole film was originally shot in Vestmannaeyjar in Iceland, but when the first director and the producers disagreed on something (budget probably), the whole project was shut down. Wolfgang Petersen took over the direction and reshot the whole film. Enemy Mine was then shot in Hungary, where labor was cheap enough to build the sets.

Author Barry Longyear reported at a convention that the studio insisted on adding a subplot involving a mine, the studio thinking the audience would not realize that the "Mine" in the title was a possessive rather than an object.

During the opening battle sequence, the computer screen inside the Drac ship is actually displaying the structure of a protein.